Wessex Tales: "The Infant and the Hare" (Story 1)

~ WESSEX TALES ~

  Eight thousand years in the life of an English village

  ‘The Infant and the Hare’

  * ‘The Infant and the Hare’ is the first story

  among 38 in my Wessex Tales collection.

  This story: ISBN 978-0-9780621-9-4

  Robert Fripp

  Copyright 2013 Robert Fripp

  To help you locate my e-stories,

  the Search Term Wessex Tales:Fripp may help.

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  Cover

  Photo by ‘blackheart’

  https://blackheart987.webs.com/darkforest.htm

  Cover design by The Design Unit,

  Wimborne, Dorset, U.K.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Endnotes

  Author’s note

  Books by Robert Fripp

  Reach me Online

  A List of my Stories

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  ~ WESSEX TALES ~

  ‘ The Infant and the Hare ’

  Eight thousand years ago

  Chapter 1

  For much of the past 6,000 years, the Ridgeway track across the Dorset Downs (uplands) has led migrants and travelers inland from the coast and on to Salisbury Plain. A major entry point for migrants and invaders, the Ridgeway was one of the most traveled highways in Stone Age England. Settlement on Salisbury Plain built up through several millennia until it supported the Wessex Culture in the district around what would become Stonehenge. But ‘The Infant and the Hare’ takes place several millennia before that took shape. Eight thousand years ago, this small party of hunter-gatherers might have been among the first humans to come this way.

  The group of eleven souls made its first autumn camp in a dell on a ridge that is now known as Shillingstone Hill.

  A spur running east from that hill almost connects the high Dorset Downs to the main chalk uplands of Salisbury Plain, except that the valley of the River Stour breaks the link between the highlands. So, for almost six thousand years this place served as a crucial river crossing on the ancient Ridgeway track. [ref_1]

  On this day so long ago, the broad, well-marked flint and chalk trail of the Ridgeway still lay two thousand years into the future. This pioneer group of hunter-gatherers had had to feel its way from the river and up the ridge along animal tracks.

  The only terrain this little party had known the past several days was a wildwood of growing oaks and dying pines, with underbrush that caught at flesh and left legs raw. They had traveled here slowly, bearing south and west towards the afternoon sun, feeling gradients through their legs, but seldom aware of the lie of the land, for deep inside perpetual woods they glimpsed not much besides the canopy of trees.

  It was Scar-chin who discovered the hollow at the top of the hill. Leaving the party to forage alone he crossed a ridge to find, stretching before him, a clearing in woods where a lightning strike some years before had burnt a stand of dying pines. The unexpected break in the forest revealed a sheltered and sheltering place near the top of the hill.

  Here they found a pit in the ground some twenty feet deep and half a stone’s throw across, where the chalk had dissolved and subsided, leaving a basin with a natural floor of deep leaf-mulch over flints. In the bottom grew a corkscrewed oak, disadvantaged for light, which put out its branches, now in this direction, now in that, in search of an open sky.

  Here, beneath the oak in the pit, the clan stopped for the night and built a roof. The twisted trunk of the living tree became the ridgepole against which the men piled dead pine trunks for rafters, covering these with horse and ox hides that they carried with them in their packs.

  While the men made a roof above them, the women set about striking fire. On the morrow they would build a hut at ground level, a thing of stakes dug into a trench with earth banked up all around and turfs stacked like bricks to keep in the warmth and keep out the wind. To live in a hut with a fire brings warmth; but to live in a hole in the ground with a fire might bring death in the night, a silent, tranquil, sleeping death, for the spirits that live in a fire steal the life-force that nourishes men. The pit would suffice to give shelter this night from the beat of the rain and the worst of the wind. But tonight, in the pit, the fire must be killed before humans could safely sleep. That much they knew.

  What they didn’t know, these pioneers, was that they had arrived on the living stage in interesting times. Glaciers were in retreat, the nearest left stranded and melting hundreds of miles to the north. Just four generations earlier the Storrega Slides tsunami had made Britain an island, and its climate, even within the memory of short and straitened lives, was changing fast. Gone were vicious spells of arctic cold and summer heat. Winds that for tens of thousands of years had blasted ice from the east and the north now blew rain from the west.

  The living envelope was changing too. Pine trees, that for eons had challenged the edge of the ice, now rotted and died in the rain, replaced by birch, then oak woods with their underbrush of alder and hazel, holly, brambles, ferns, and furze.

  Travel brought an ever-present threat, with valleys deep in flood or mired, the uplands a difficult tangle of forest threaded by arteries carved out by oxen, wolves, and bears; criss-crossed again by smaller veins, the tunnels of martens, stoats, badgers, and hares. This was the time when a red squirrel might cross Britain without setting its foot on the ground.

  The clan beneath the oak this night had known many cycles of dearth and plenty: indeed, they seldom experienced the happy state of adequacy that falls between.

  But in valuable ways these humans were twice-blessed heirs to a legacy of skills from two different peoples who had come this way before, had known the land awhile, and gone again, leaving only their flint tools in its soil. From ancient forest-dwellers who crossed the marshes into Britain from the steppes of Northern Europe these hunter-gatherers had learned the art of making heavy axes out of flake-formed flint. And from a mysterious, delicate-fingered race that came to Britain from the south, these people learned to craft flint flakes into tiny arrowheads, harpoons, and fishing spears. Evening falls on three men, four women—one of whom is eight months pregnant—a little boy, and three small girls, all clustered around an embryo of fire that women build, striking it with flint and a nodule of marcasite, the spirit-balls of fire-stuff that Middle Stone Age humans know to ferret from the chalk.

  At this remove in time we can know very little of these people: their legacy is confined to flint-hewn points and blades. Their once-presence on this hill-top and the aura of their being has slipped beyond recall of cultural memory, borne away millennia ago by later migrations, more ruthless invaders, and the rush of the downland wind. One cannot even speculate upon the nature of their names: characteristics must suffice.

  The leader, One-tooth, perhaps in his thirties, wears dark brown hair past his shoulders, a full beard streaked with grey, and a ragged covering of sewn hides. Come winter he’ll turn the fur side inside, but not yet, and his legs and arms are bare. Beside him sits Scar-chin, younger, stronger, almost ready to challenge for leadership, but he lacks experience of field-craft, and he knows it. The oldest male, Sunken-cheek, appears sallow and wasted, not likely to survive another winter, perhaps not eager to, but still the best arrow-shot among them, and handy with a spear.

  Across the fire, the women take turns blowing life into the flame, feeding it leaves, dry twigs, and the tinder of puffball fungus that they always carry in a greased-hide fire-bag. Small-ears is oldest, not yet a crone but given to playing matriarch, instructing the others on how to entice
fire-spirits, at the same time flensing the skins of a wild-cat and stoat that the men had caught in dead-fall traps the night before.

  Blonde-hair, the pregnant one—One-tooth’s mate—does most of the work with the fire, lying on her side to ease her load. The river crossing that afternoon had been brutal—the ford was as swollen as she—and after the crossing came a two-mile climb to the top of the Downs up the spur of Shillingstone Hill. She knows she held them back today: her struggle with reluctant fire-ghosts is a sort of atonement. Perhaps One-tooth should have waited in summer camp till his woman dropped her child, but the needs of the clan came first. They had to leave the main chalk uplands at least a month before the autumn equinox to gather elderberries, early blackberries, and hazelnuts that grew in such profusion through this winter hunting ground.

  The third woman in the group, Left-handed, travels with Scar-chin. Although two of her children are grown and gone she is still pretty; but now she frowns, holding the stoat’s carcass skewered on a stick, waiting impatiently to roast its little mass above the flames. Nor is a tardy fire her only irritation. The youngest woman, Coquette, barely past puberty, is a child in a woman’s body, with few of a woman’s woes to temper the natural exuberance with which she teases the men as they huddle together, bound by the fire, by the onrush of night, by the sides of the pit, by their need for each other in a hard world. Bound by the carcasses, too. There is precious little but nuts to eat this night, but eat they will.

  One-tooth surveyed his little clan, the ready meat, the rising flame, and smiled. Within a spitting distance of the crackling twigs was everything that humankind desired. Soon, flame-ghosts permitting, they would eat, they would be warm and dry, and they would sleep.